Simonista

A web portfolio by Simon Williams

Please be aware that this web portfolio is a work in progress and
may change frequently over the coming weeks.

Projects

These projects respresent a combination of work I have done over the
last several years as an employee, contractor, and student. They will
demonstrate a variety of skills, areas of interest, and levels of completion/success.

Urbster (Version 2)

Urbster is a social iPhone
application centered around sharing photos and messages with groups
– friends, family, colleagues, or even just people who share a
common interest. Our modus operandi for groups is private by
default and symmetric, meaning if I'm part of a group from my
perspective, I'm also part of that group from your perspective. This
massively reduces the overhead of manually currating lists of friends,
but at the cost that everyone in the group sees every post made to that
group – there's no per-post visibility customization. This
tradeoff supports a vision of quick sharing to a specific set of people
without getting lost in the firehose or having to manually tag the people
you'd like to reach.

From a technical point of view, the app is communicating with a server
via JSON to refresh and post to a group timeline, as well as manage the
group creation, invitation, and joining processes. We built our backend using a
pretty standard ruby/rails setup: